Gayle Ciardi, the first woman to serve as a watershed keeper for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, is the fourth-generation of her family to work on the SFPUC watershed.
Cindy Spring
A Force To Be Reckoned With
Barbara Salzman was “hooked on nature” after taking her young son on field trips with Elizabeth Terwilliger, Marin’s legendary environmental educator. Salzman is now president of the Marin Audubon Society (MAS), which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. The organization … Read more
Sleuthing Sudden Oak Death
By the time that sudden oak death (SOD) began hitting North Bay oaks and tanoaks in the mid-1990s, Ted Swiecki and Elizabeth Bernhardt, husband-and-wife plant pathologists, had been studying oak diseases in California oak woodlands for many years in the … Read more
Don’t Call Them Bugs
Edward Ross has visited every continent except Antarctica in pursuit of his passion for studying, collecting, dissecting, classifying, naming, photographing, and deeply appreciating insects. In between his globe-trotting adventures, the 89-year old curator emeritus of entomology at the California Academy … Read more
Happy Trails
The single-track trail along the creek looks quite inviting: just wide enough for hiking, with no fallen limbs or nasty briars sticking out, a canopy overhead. It all seems so natural. But Melvin Johnson knows better. As operations coordinator for … Read more
Revitalizing Urban Creeks
Urban creek restoration involves more than removing nonnative plants and substituting local ones. Add to that: volunteer management skills and detailed knowledge of bird, amphibian, fish, and mammal habitats; flood plain control; water quality; government ordinances; and the right size … Read more
Saving El Palo Alto
Imagine a landmark so prominent that anyone looking south from San Francisco or north from San Jose could spot it. Spanish missionary Padre Pedro Font wrote in his diary in March 1776: “I beheld in the distance a tree of … Read more
Grazing for Change
When two hikers complained to state park rangers recently about an area severely trampled by grazing cows, they drew on a strong current of suspicion that many people feel toward ranchers. And why not? Past ranching and range-management practices, even … Read more